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Surprise (Or Not)! Men Are Spoiled!

Lately I've had reason to understand (via Six Tests to Determine If He's Mr. Right and To Single Women: Men. Don't. Change) that women find men as mysterious as I know men find women. That this is true comes as a bit of surprise to me. I always thought that trying to figure out a man was like trying to figure out a banana. (Wait. Yellow; delicious for awhile; ultimately becomes something slimy that causes people to trip and fall. So, that metaphor won't do. No, it won't. It won't! Stop it!)

So. Men. Let's think about them/us.

Okay, so here's one thing about men that I think women sometimes fail to understand: Men are really, really spoiled.

Hey, it's not like we like being spoiled. It's actually quite awful, because so often it amounts to the truth that we're almost congenitally incapable of being satisfied. We always want more, different, bigger, better. What is is never enough for us. You try having your cake and eating it all the time. It's exhausting.

There are four Humongous Reasons that we manly types tend to be more spoiled than ... okay, fine: last month's bananas: The world, hormones, parents, and women generally. Let's look real quick at why/how each of those four conspires to make every man in the world feel that, when push comes to shove, he is the center of the known universe.

The World As you may be aware, humans are the dominant species on our planet. (Yes, dolphins are swimming Einsteins and make perfectly adequate TV stars. But only humans can make pizza and operate blimps. So we win.) Males are the bigger and stronger of the two basic models in which humans come. Which means male humans live at the very tippy-tippy top of the food chain. We're Number One! And we feel that being number one entitles us to ... well, have whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want. It's not a pretty thing -- and it's unlikely that for any given guy it's even a conscious thing. But it's there. Being a guy means inheriting the emotional legacy that comes with knowing that since time immemorial Your Specific Kind, through sheer physical prowess, has utterly dominated the only world humans have ever known. That means something to a guy. It means that, just by virtue of being a guy, he's more entitled than the King of England. (Hey, hey! No queen jokes!)

Hormones Scientists have long been aware of the fact that the introduction of testosterone into the bloodstream invariably transforms perfectly normal people into people who enjoy World Wide Wrestling and smashing cans on their foreheads. Sadly, scientists don't know what to do about the effects of testosterone -- and, being mostly men, don't much care. We enjoy producing testosterone, is why. Testosterone is fun; it' s fun having hair on your back and just knowingyou could have been a pro athlete. Testosterone is what allows a man to do important things, like stare at a car engine with a bunch of other men and pretend he knows a carburetor from a blender. Without testosterone, a man grunting appreciatively at a car engine would have to break right down and ask for a hug. What fun is that? (Besides, hugging wrinkles your clothes.) The ugly side of testosterone, though, is that it makes you physically and emotionally aggressive. And the whole point of being aggressive is that you want something -- and you want whatever you want now. No matter how we manage to mitigate it through Proper Socialization Skills and Not Wanting To Get Arrested, at a basic, hormonallevel men are driven to want, want, and want some more. And being driven by your wants is the very definition of spoiled. Now send me money so I can buy stuff.

Parents I would be the last person on earth to suggest this, but I've heard it's just possible that, in some very select instances, some mothers tend to spoil their sons (if for no other reason than that they love them and want them to have everything they want), and that some fathers also spoil their sons, because (being men) it's difficult for them notto see their sons primarily as Mini-Thems. But those could just be rumors. I could do the research to find out for sure, but I don't want to because I'm hungry and want someone to feed me now. And besides, my thinking something is true is just the same as it being true. So there.

Women Women do tend to spoil their men. Women by nature nurture; men by nature enjoy being nurtured (while, of course, pretending we don't). Women are passive and receptive; men are Action Oriented and .... givers. The bottom line? A lot of women, for a lot of reasons, spoil their men. And all men know it. And they like it. And they want it to happen to them, too. Most can't imagine why it wouldn't.

Anyway, of course these are all gross (and even offensive, I know) simplifications of necessarily complex innerpersonal dynamics.

Still. It's been my humble experience that some or even a lot of women just do not get men. And one of the things they don't get about men is that men are deeply spoiled. Or, rather, women get that men are spoiled (it's not like we ever try to hide it or anything, is it?) -- they just don't get why men are spoiled.

So that's why: Our relationship to the world, our parents, and women generally -- that, plus Hormones Gone Wild -- tend to make we men feel, in our very bones, like ... like there's a reason that both we and the King of the Beasts have truly outstanding hair, and enjoy having meals brought to them by women.

No, but you know what I mean. This is, still, a man's world. And men know it. And it makes them feel that it should be a man's world.

And that sense of entitlement can be the cause of a whooooooole lot of trouble. As you know. As we all know, whether we admit it or not.

Next time: What a woman can do about the fact that her man is spoiled.